The Best Unknown Park in America

CHINLE, Ariz. — On the floor of Canyon de Chelly, what pops up in three dimensions of desert light are the remains of 900-year-old stone apartments, the graveyard of peach trees cut down by Kit Carson’s Indian killers, and sandstone walls that drew the cameras of Edward Curtis and Ansel Adams.

But it’s much more than a still life. Here is a Navajo farmer, tilling corn and squash in red dirt next to a home in the shape of the traditional hogan, door facing the rising sun. There is the sound of sheep bells bouncing off spires the size of the Washington Monument. And just now comes a runner in braids, grinding up vertical feet under the midday sun.

This federal monument, where the past is not dead or even past, is alive like no other unit of the National Park Service. People live in the Canyon de Chelly (pronounced d’SHAY), and they are much more than props for all those visitors from France and Germany. As the national parks try to reinvent themselves in an age when people are bored by anything that can’t be delivered by smart phone, one model is the Indian way.

For Canyon de Chelly is a fascinating hybrid: it’s administered by the Park Service, but is entirely within the confines of the Navajo Nation, which is bigger in size than 10 of the states. It feels authentic, beloved, haunting. And because you are smack dab inside of Indian Country, things are different here: alcohol is prohibited (no beer gardens at canyon’s edge), a Navajo guide is required for most trips to the floor, and they have their own time zone, choosing daylight savings while the rest of Arizona stays on standard.

Timothy Egan

So many of the parks have a sterile feel to them — nature behind glass. They are about artificial borders and clean lines: the wild on one side, humanity on the other. Canyon de Chelly preserves the natural wonders, and the equally unique human world. My visit was fun, full of surprises, but also instructive in the evolving notion of America’s Best Idea – the national parks. I was lucky, also, that smoke from Arizona’s largest wildfire was blowing well to the east, which left intact that infinity view of the Southwest.

For my money, Canyon de Chelly is a better experience than Grand Canyon, which has an industrial tourism feel, especially on the South Rim.

“We often hear people say they liked Canyon de Chelly much better than Grand Canyon because of the intimate experience with local people,” said Tom Clark, the canyon superintendent, in an interview. “The Navajo are proud of this place. It’s sacred to them. And when people come here, they pick that up.”

Yes, it’s hard to get here: Phoenix and Albuquerque are a long day’s drive. But then, in the midst of this seeming isolation (actually a home to nearly 300,000 Navajo people), is this wondrous slit in the earth — full of history, archaeology, stunning canyon country and the routines of daily life.

If you visit parks in Europe — in the Dolomite Mountains of Italy, for example — you happen upon stone huts that have been inhabited for centuries, and cows grazing in high-altitude meadows, as always. People live there. In these alpine hideaways, you often hear dialects spoken nowhere else in Europe. Food, songs, crafts are indigenous to place.

The American parks, with a handful of exceptions, long ago kicked out the Indians who hunted, worshiped or marked up the rocks with intriguing bits of petroglyph art. Blackfeet used to live in Glacier National Park. The Crow hunted in Yellowstone. And Miwok knew the music of Yosemite’s waterfalls long before John Muir did. Later, Anglo herders of cattle or sheep were also removed.

This was done to protect the resource: livestock, famously derided as “hoofed locusts,” by Muir, can graze a fragile meadow into a death zone. And we know what excessive hunting did to the great bison herds; Yellowstone was created, in part, as a refuge for what was left of this original American animal.

But you can make a case for letting people, with some history and purpose that is not detrimental to the land, weave their lives back into protected lands. Some park supporters fear that Indians would be an embarrassment: they’re poor, they remind the rest of us of the great swindles that preceded the modern nation of 310 million people. The challenge is to avoid top-down attempts to put Indians on display in a time-frozen “natural state.” A more realistic natural state may actually be a casino, with a decent buffet and lots of fresh fry bread, or pickup basketball at sunset.

At Canyon de Chelly, such questions have long ago been resolved. This is Indian land, by the treaty of 1868. Though the ruins belonged to the Anasazi, ancestors of the Hopi and Pueblo people, the canyon has Navajo ties from before the Declaration of Independence. The worst episode, Kit Carson’s destruction of orchards, food stores and fields, followed by a 300-mile march to a concentration camp, is known to every Navajo.

Even with that brutal back story, they welcome people to the canyon, here to find the rarest of all things in the United States: a big land with a thousand years of compact human history.

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Timothy Egan worked for The Times for 18 years – as Pacific Northwest correspondent and a national enterprise reporter. His column on American politics and life as seen from the West Coast appears here on Fridays. In 2001, he was part of the Pulitzer Prize-winning team that wrote the series “How Race Is Lived in America.” He is the author of several books, including “The Worst Hard Time,” a history of the Dust Bowl, for which he won the National Book Award, “The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America” and, most recently, “Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis.” As of October 2013, Timothy Egan’s column can be found in a new location in the Opinion section »